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John Armstrong On Creative Layout Design Soft Cover 1978
The wit, whim, and best of all wisdom of John Armstrong on Creative Layout Design edited by Mike Schafer
Soft Cover
123 pages
Copyright 1978
CONTENTS
Introduction page 2
LAYOUT DESIGN AS INFLUENCED BY
1 Pike location page 4
LAYOUT DESIGN AS INFLUENCED BY
2 Scale and gauge page 25
LAYOUT DESIGN AS INFLUENCED BY
3 Scenic realism page 42
LAYOUT DESIGN AS INFLUENCED BY
4 Prototypes page 65
LAYOUT DESIGN AS INFLUENCED BY
5 Pike purpose page 91
LAYOUT DESIGN AS INFLUENCED BY
6 A unifying them page 107
Appendix page 120
Index page 123
Creative Layout Design shows how YOU can:
Find a home for your pike, even if you think you don't have the room
Use different combinations of scale and gauge to tailor your layout to the space available
Construct a lighting system that will provide realistic "sun" shadows
Build a club layout that can peacefully coexist with club members - and the public
Use layout modules to serve two pikes
Model today's railroading - unit trains, Amtrak, Auto-Train, and revitalized short lines
Model a "brief moment" in railroad history
INTRODUCTION:
IN THE EARLY DAYS of model railroading we spent most of our time building models. But the scratchbuilder who in the 1930's and 1940's devoted months to building a single locomotive or to detailing a string of boxcars now sees a vast profusion of first-rate ready-to-assemble, ready-to-add-on, and ready-to-run items leaping at him from hundreds of pages of advertisements. Many of these store-bought items make our best handmade superdetailed models of even a decade ago look almost primitive by comparison. Does this mean that anyone with enough money can buy himself a perfect ready-made model railroad layout? Has the thrill of creation disappeared?
Not a chance! We can now spend the hours once devoted to model building to building model railroads. A manufacturer may be able to produce the elements of a railroad-locomotives, cars, structures-but he cannot produce the railroad itself. In fact, neither he nor you can produce a model railroad that is a literal, albeit miniaturized, reproduction of a prototype railroad. Even a branch line or short line re-created in true horizontal proportion would stick out both ends of a mansion. You must adapt your chosen railroad to fit the space available and you must decide which elements to leave out. You must compress selectively.
When you do this, you are being creative. In that sense a model railroad is a personal thing, like any other work of art. You can buy paints, canvas, brushes, and a book that tells you how to paint, but the finished picture-the selection and arrangement of the elements of which it is composed-is up to you.
Model railroading is one of the most satisfying hobbies partly because models of full-scale flanged-wheel-on-track transportation equipment can be duplicated in miniature so precisely and can be made to operate so realistically. But model railroading can also be one of the most creative hobbies because you can build a system and your system can be different from any other.
Even if you and your neighbor each build layouts by snapping together track and use the same track plan, you'll each have a unique system-his might be the Santa Fe with red and-silver streamliners gliding past mission-style structures, while yours is the Naugatuck Central with subdued Pullman green open-platform coaches rambling through the flaming foliage of a Connecticut autumn.
BEYOND THE MECHANICS
Your pike has to fit into the space available, and it shouldn't violate too many principles of practical model railroading if it's to be fun to operate. My earlier book, TRACK PLANNING FOR REALISTIC OPERATION, explains most of the principles involved in pounding dreams into reality. But there's nothing like learning by doing, of course, and many books and magazine articles have dealt with the care and feeding of small starter pikes, making the learn-by-doing route thoroughly practical-so sensible, in fact, that the small pike built from well-tested plans is the best way to gain experience.
CREATIVE LAYOUT DESIGN takes you a few steps beyond TRACK PLANNING; it will help you build a model railroad that extracts more of what the hobby has to offer in continued building and operating fun. This means looking beyond the obvious limits of the space the railroad is to occupy, seeking a not-so-well-known prototype, considering what scenes will look like from controlled viewing points, and exploring unconventional ways of moving trains around behind the scenes.
IDEAS-RARE, MEDIUM, AND WELL-DONE
Many of the approaches I discuss represent new modeling subjects, but use well-established and often-published construction techniques. Other schemes haven't received much publicity, but they've been tested long enough to prove their practicality.
In some areas, such as layout lighting, no one (so far as I know) has yet invented a definitively superior way of solving a well-known problem. I have, however, provided some facts and suggestions that may help you work out solutions to these problems. Any of my ideas that haven't been thoroughly tested in actual practice are so labeled. If you do fight your way through to success along one of these "un-chartered" courses I've suggested, you'll have all the material you'll need to become an NMRA Achiever Award "Model Railroad Author"! Of course, some model railroader somewhere may already have licked the problem but has kept his light under a bushel.
TRACK PLANS-WITH RESERVATIONS
A satisfying model railroad is one in which good ideas are combined into a workable whole; the track plan is the connective tissue that holds these essentials together. Therefore the themes of each chapter in CREATIVE LAYOUT DESIGN have been illustrated, for the most part, by layouts appropriate for the space actually available in typical basements, garages, attics, and other model railroading areas of America. Combine, bend, expand, or contract the elements of these layouts to adapt them to your own situation. Sometimes adaptation means changing scales; the appendix provides some information about the possibilities in this direction. I've already covered redrawing techniques and the many details of track planning that become important when a plan is altered in TRACK PLANNING FOR REALISTIC OPERATION, so look there if you need help.
To those of us interested in modeling a working railroad, the track plan is just a means to an end. Our goal is to design a layout that can provide realistic train movements. Although there's quite a bit of discussion in this book on train consists, maneuvers, and scheduling, I refer you to Bruce Chubb's elegantly illustrated How To OPERATE YOUR MODEL RAILROAD, published by Kalmbach, for a more thorough presentation of such matters.
Now that we no longer need to spend precious hours researching, scratchbuilding, inventing, developing, and procuring in piecemeal the locomotives, cars, trackwork, and structures that are the essential ingredients of the model railroad, we can become more creative railroad modelers. Here's your invitation to take an imaginative, thoughtful look at the big picture, the final layout-a layout whose personality will set it apart from every other pike in the country and one that you'll never find on the hobby shop shelf.
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